Veena Sud makes crime stories that stay with the people left behind rather than with the person who did it. Her patience with grief is the best thing in her work and, stretched over too many wet episodes, the worst.
Fi1m perspective
Veena Sud's crime stories open on a body and then look away from it. What interests her is the house the dead person came from: a kitchen, a telephone, parents who have not yet been told. In The Killing (2011), her remake of the Danish series Forbrydelsen, one murder is spread across whole seasons, each episode roughly a day, and the investigation is only half the programme. The other half is a family in a rain-soaked Seattle getting through the days after. "My interest as a writer has always been with the cost of a life," she has said, and on the evidence it is true.
She came to this by way of Cold Case (2003), a procedural on which she rose from writer to executive producer and learned to build a story around a victim. The Killing was the turn: the case that would not close, the colour drained to green and grey, the sound mix doing the work the dialogue would not. Nineteen directors are credited across its 44 episodes, Patty Jenkins at the start, Jonathan Demme and Agnieszka Holland later, and it looks like one person's programme throughout, which tells you how firmly she ran it. She directed an episode herself; her job was the whole thing.
Her own account is that the row over that series pushed her towards stories that finish. Seven Seconds (2018), a limited series about a police hit-and-run and the cover-up around it, told its whole story in a single run. The Lie (2018), a feature adapted from a German film about parents covering for a teenager's crime, brought back Mireille Enos and put Peter Sarsgaard beside her. Before that she shot The Salton Sea (2016) over two weekends in the desert, and after it she made The Stranger (2020) in short episodes built to be watched on a phone. We have not reviewed these and will not pretend to a view beyond the pattern: the same questions of whose life counts and what people do when nobody is looking, asked in less time.
Her best quality and her worst are the same thing, which is patience. She will give a grieving mother a scene in which nothing happens but waiting, and she will give the viewer forty episodes of waiting around it. Our review of The Killing found two detectives worth following and a grief worth watching, rationed across far too many wet hours, and we stand by that. What got to us was never the question of who killed Rosie Larsen. It was the Larsens, and Michelle Forbes in particular, in rooms so underlit and so quiet that we found ourselves holding our breath. Then the detectives would get back in the car, the rain would start again, and we would remember how many episodes were left.
Start with the first season, for Enos, Kinnaman and Forbes, and stop when the waiting stops paying. Her later work is shorter, and she seems to have noticed why.
Biography
Veena Sud is a Canadian-born American television writer, director and producer. She is best known as the creator, writer and executive producer of the crime drama series The Killing (2011–2014), an adaptation of the Danish series Forbrydelsen. The series earned her a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series and a Writers Guild of America nomination.
Sud was born in Toronto and graduated from Barnard College before earning an MFA from New York University’s Film and Television program. She began her career in journalism and later wrote for series including Push, Nevada (2002). She served as a writer and executive producer on the CBS drama Cold Case (2003–2008).
Her subsequent credits include creating and writing Seven Seconds (2018) for Netflix, writing and directing the film The Lie (2018), and creating the series The Stranger (2020).
